Ransomware Trojans detected recently in the wild display bogus messages from law enforcement agencies in Europe and ask users to pay nonexistent fines, Microsoft warned.
"We have recently seen the emergence of several samples of a ransomware family localized into different languages," researchers from Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center (MMPC) said in a blog post Monday.
The ransomware variants detected so far masqueraded as national police agencies from Germany, the U.K., Spain, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
The Trojans are distributed via drive-by-download attacks that are launched from compromised websites. The attack toolkit most commonly used for this purpose is called Blackhole and contains exploits for unpatched installations of Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Java and Windows.